Progress Software Delivers Portable PaaS Environment

While it’s clear that enterprise IT organizations are warming up to cloud computing many of them remain uncomfortable with the lack of control they have over the cloud, especially when it comes to relying on cloud service providers that might lock them into a specific platform.

In an ideal world an enterprise IT organization would be able to pick up their cloud application and move it anywhere they want for any reason.

That’s the thinking that went into the development of Progress Pacific, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering unfurled this week by Progress Software. Based on the PaaS platform developed by Rollbase, which Progress acquired this week, Progress Pacific is designed to give customers maximum control over their applications.

According to John Goodson, senior vice president of product development at Progress Software, Progress Pacific differs from most other PaaS environments in that customers have the option of hosting it anywhere. Not only is it not tied to any specific cloud service, Progress Pacific supports commonly used Javascript programming tools in addition to the 4GL and modeling tools developed by Progress.

In addition, Progress Pacific supports Data Direct, a data integration tools that allows developers to invoke data sources at run-time rather than when they are initially designing the application.

Goodson says that Progress Pacific is specifically designed to meet the needs of small-to-medium (SMB) organizations looking to build custom applications in the cloud. As cloud computing becomes more generally accessible organizations of all sizes are increasing the investment in custom applications because it allows them to develop applications that are specifically tailored for their business process, which often takes as much time to do as it does to try and customize a packaged application.

Because those organizations no longer have to acquire the infrastructure needed to run those applications, the risk associated with developing custom applications in the cloud is substantially reduced. Progress Pacific gives them the option to ten continue running those applications in the cloud, or move them to their own data center environment. Or vice versa, they can choose to develop the application locally and then move it to an external cloud service provider later.

Whatever the deployment model, PaaS technologies make it a lot easier to stand up custom applications, which is leading to something of a Renaissance period in custom application development in the enterprise.

While that’s not likely to lead to mass abandonment of packaged applications, it is leading to the development of innovative applications that allow companies to better differentiate themselves from competitors by developing their own intellectual software property.

The challenge, of course, is making sure they don’t lose control of that property once they actually put in the time to develop it.